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Mirage of Greek Continuity 289
vous ne croyiez avoir déjà vu l’image sur quelques bas-reliefs ou sur
une pierre antique. (ii. 173–4).
Lechevalier happens to meet in the Laurion ‘un jeune berger
chausé de cothurnes et exactement vêtu à la manière des anciens
Grecs’ (1802, 118).
Guys, who was first disappointed at not finding any more
‘those celebrated artists whose race is extinct or those paintings
or statues which have been destroyed or carried away’, is amply
compensated by the contemplation of their very original, ‘the
striking scenes before [him that] might have served as models
for the painters, sculptors and poets of ancient Greece . . . the
living pictures, the animated statues which industry and talents
must copy with success’ (ii., 112, 113). Watching Greek women
occupied with embroidery, he sees ‘a living portrait’ of the
industrious wife painted after nature by Virgil’ (ii. 46); touring
the country, he becomes acquainted with ‘the shepherds and
pipers of Theocritus’ (ii. 166).
In modern Greece, travellers are not only transported to
ancient Greece. They come into contact with a primeval world
characterized by the simplicity of its manners and identified
with pure nature—as opposed to the refined modes of modern
life. Greeks, according to Guys, ‘have to this day preserved the
simplicity of the manners and customs of the earliest periods’
(i. 46). Choiseul-Gouffier, discovering in Ios a world where
‘tout rappelle la simplicité des premiers âges’ (1782, 20) would
readily have agreed.
Modern Greece becomes a world cut off from history, and a
place where time stands still, since it is inaccessible to the
civilization and the changes it brings with it. But as modern
Greece becomes representative of the primitive, it loses something
of its particular appeal. The Greeks are assimilated to
these oriental peoples who, as Choiseul-Gouffier says, 24 have
not lost the manners described in the most ancient annals of the
world, that is Homer but also the Bible. It becomes part of that
Levant where Riedesel wanted to go to escape the curse of
civilization, and to find ‘un pays où l’habillement, les moeurs
24 Choiseul-Gouffier, ii, 104: ‘Les peuples d’Orient n’ont donc perdu presque
aucun des usages décrits dans les plus anciennes annales du monde, dans
les livres saints ou dans les chants d’Homère.’